Welcome to issue number three hundred and thirty-two of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

I am falling a little behind on the event posts, but I assure you that I will post reports from ShiftAPPens and JavaConnect KE shortly. In the meantime, check out this update from the GlassFish project. Among other things, GlassFish 9.0.0-M2 is updated with Jakarta EE 12 implementation and Jakarta REST integration with Jakarta Authorization.

Another item in my backlog is also to write the continuation of my article about AI and open source. It is starting to materialize in my mind, so it shouldn’t last too long before I am ready to write it up. Note that I am not using any AI tooling to write my posts. I take pride in my work, and don’t want to go down that path.

The progress for the specifications that have been asked to produce updates for Milestone 4 of Jakarta EE 12 looks very promising. Check out the minutes from this week’s call for the details. Another piece of good news regarding Jakarta EE 12 is that the Jakarta NoSQL project may be able to merge the features planned for Jakarta NoSQL 1.2 in Jakarta NoSQL 1.1. That means that it will certainly be a stronger candidate for inclusion in Jakarta EE 12.

Welcome to issue number three hundred and thirty-one of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

I am currently in Coimbra, Portugal, for ShiftAPPens 2026. This is the ninth edition of this hackathon that is organised by and for students. As a Gold sponsor, Jakarta EE was allowed to have a challenge in the hackathon. Among the 150 students in various stages of their education, eight teams of up to four members chose to take on our challenge. At the time of writing this post, we hadn’t yet selected the winner among them. Directly after the closing of ShiftAPPens, I will continue to England to give a guest lecture at the University of York.

An interesting thing that came out of Open Community eXperience last week is this analyst report about Jakarta EE from ECI. It is a good writeup that highlights that Jakarta EE is built for longevity rather than being first on the hype curve. The article also points out that vendor-neutral integration standards will become increasingly valuable in the enterprise market.

For Jakarta EE 12, Milestone 4 is approaching. The Jakarta EE Platform project expects to see deliverables from the following individual specifications for this milestone:

• REST 5.0 M1 API / spec
• CDI 5.0 Milestone / Beta (currently at Alpha4)
• JSON-P 2.2 M1 API / spec
• JSON-B 3.1 M1 API / spec

Check out the Jakarta EE 12 planning board for the current status.

Next weekend, I will be speaking at JavaConnect KE 2026 in Nairobi, Kenya. This will be a brand new talk about how to augment LLMS with various agentic techniques using Jakarta EE as the foundation. This will be my first visit to Kenya, so I am really looking forward to connect with the local Java community there.

Welcome to issue number three hundred and thirty of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

This week, I was at Open Community eXperience (OCX) in Brussels. I will publish a post about it shortly. This year, OCX unfortunately conflicted with JCON Europe in Cologne. This was kind of a bummer for me, but these things happen in the busy conference season. Next year, at least these two conferences won’t conflict. The dates for OCX 2027 are April 13-15, while JCON Europe 2027 will be May 31-June 3.

Eclipse Foundation is rolling out GitHub CoPilot Enterprise to all committers and I was so lucky to be in the first batch. It will enable us to automate some of the tasks associated with the JESP (Jakarta EE Specification Process). I set up instructions for CoPilot in the template for Compatibility Requests, so we can use an agent to validate the requests. One of the checklist items for that is to validate that the SHA-256 sums of the TCKs listed match. Definietely something a machine is more capable of getting right than a human. Of course, the actual approval of the request will still need a human in the loop to verify that everything is correct.

When I started the Hasthag Jakarta EE series, one of my goals was to include articles and posts about or adjacent to Jakarta EE to help amplify the good work done in our community. I do it from time to time, but I also want to do more, so please send me a link to an article if you want it mentioned here. For example, this article by Rustam about API versioning in Java using JAX-RS with Jakarta EE and MicroProfile is an excellent read that I higly recommend that you take a look at.

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-nine of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

The upcoming week, I will be in Brussels for Open Community eXperience 2026. My talk, titled The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java – with Jakarta EE is scheduled for Wednesday. When I am not attending other talks or roaming the hallway, I can be found staffing the Eclipse Foundation booth in the exhibition area. I hope to see you there!

The release of Jakarta EE 12 consists of multiple Milestones that are continuously being refined to reflect the current status. In the Platform call last week, the platform project set up expectations for a couple of the milestones. First out is Milestone 4, in which the specifications that are part of Jakarta EE Core Profile are expected to show progress in the form of milestone or beta-releases.

M4 Apr 1 to May 15
– REST 5.0 M1 API / spec
– CDI 5.0 Milestone / Beta (currently at Alpha4)
– JSON-P 2.2 M1 API / spec
– JSON-B 3.1 M1 API / spec
M5 May 16 to Jun 30
– content to be defined
M6 Jul 1 to Aug 15
– content to be defined
M7 Aug 15 to Sep 30
– Ideally, we release Core profile here or soon after
M8 Oct 1 to Nov 15
– content to be defined
M9 Jan 1 to Feb 15, 2027
– Finalize all other specifications
M10 Feb 16 to Mar 31, 2027
– Release Platform TCK with ratifying impl

The Platform Project will continue to refine this timeline by adding expectations to each milestone. Note that even if a specification is not listed for a specific milestone, nothing prevents it from publishing ahead of time. If the current plan holds, we should be able to release Jakarta EE Core Profile in Q4, 2026, while Jakarta EE Web Profile and Jakarta EE Platform will be released in Q1 or Q2 next year. This follows the same pattern as for Jakarta EE 11.

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-seven of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrates! Right before the Easter holiday, I went to Amsterdam for Voxxed Days Amsterdam 2026. This was the second year this conference was organized, and they had almost 1000 registered attendees. Could this be the next Devoxx? It should certainly be a candidate. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Devoxx Amsterdam next year.

I also attended the Jakarta EE Platform call, which was pretty good this week. Well attended and lots of good discussions. Among other things, we talked about how the three security specifications relate to each other. For historic reasons, Jakarta Authorization is not a part of Jakarta EE Web Profile, while both Jakarta Authentication and Jakarta Security are. There has been talk about merging the security specifications into one Jakarta Security at some point. The first step would be to include Authorization in Web Profile. This is certainly something we can do for Jakarta EE 12.

Since I am enjoying a couple of extra days at home over Easter (the first time I am home more than two consecutive days since January), I decided to do some cleaning up of the online resources for Javaforum Malmö. I have been in the fortunate situation of having Foo Café as a venue for the Java User Group over the last 10 years. I would provide the speaker and agenda, and Foo Café would handle everything else. Promotion, registration, catering, and sponsors. Our February event was one of the last at Foo Café before they closed down, so now I have to think differently. I created a simple website to gather our contact points and set up an Eventbrite account to use for registration to our events.

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-six of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

Next week I will be having a booth at Voxxed Amsterdam since Jakarta EE was offered a space in the Community Square as one of the ambassadors of the conference. I hope to meet as many as possible of you there! If the swag gods are with me, I will be able to bring some nice stuff. There will be stickers, for sure.

The next conference I am speaking at will be Open Community eXperience 2026. This conference is located in Brussels, Belgium from April 21 to April 23. I will be presenting The Past, Present, and Future of Enterprise Java on Wednesday, April 22.

Due to my fairly intensive traveling the last couple of months, I have not been able to attend as many Jakarta EE Platform calls as I would have wanted. But from what I can se from the minutes, Jakarta EE 12 is slowly moving forward. There are a couple of specifications publishing milestone releasees. Among them Jakarta Faces 5.0, Jakarta NoSQL 1.1, as well as Jakarta JSON Binding 3.1.

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-five of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

I am on my way home from JavaOne 2026 with a bag full of swag and a head full of inspiration and new ideas. One of the ideas has already resulted in a brand new abstract that I have submitted to a couple of upcoming conferences. Let’s hope the program committees are as excited as I am about it. If accepted, I think the conference attendees choosing to listen to my talk are up for a treat.

Jakarta EE 12 Milestone 3 is coming up. There is some activity in various specification projects, which is good. Others, on the other hand, could benefit from a little wakening call. There was a welcoming update from Jakarta RESTful Web Services in the platform call this week. It seems like they are making some progress in the CDI replacement of @Context.

You may be using skills to augment your AI Agents in some way or the other. SkillsJars offer a simple solution to publish skills as JAR-files on Maven Central. It is a pretty cool project created by James Ward. I recommend taking a look at it. It may simplify your workflow significantly if you are moving a lot of skills around by copy-paste on the file system. With SkillsJars, you simply add them as dependencies to your project.

A cool thing that was announced at JavaOne this year was the reopening of Project Detroit. The purpose of this project is to bring JavaScript and Python to the JVM. The project was brought to life as a result of the Foreign Function & Memory API from Project Panama.

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-four of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

Last week, I was at JavaLand 2026. It was my eleventh time at this conference. This year, it was back in a theme park again with almost 1500 attendees registered. Next week, I will go to California for JavaOne which is located for the second time at the Oracle conference center in Redwood Shores. I am not going to be a speaker this year, but in some way I am anyway since I will be hosting a mentoring session in the JavaOne Mentorship Hub. After that, I will also be present at Voxxed Days Amsterdam where Jakarta EE will have a booth in the Community Square.

Jakarta EE 12 moves along. The release is planned for Q4, 2026, but there is no reason to wait until then to try out some of the new features. Jakarta Persistence 4.0 has released a Milestone 1 that is implemented in Hibernate 8.0.0.alpha1. I am also working on a SkillsJar for Jakarta EE. Of course, I will let you know immediately when I have it ready.

If you are interested in attending Open Community eXperience in Brussels this April, please reach out to me for a 30% discount code. This is an opportunity to meet the rest of the quite diverse Eclipse Foundation community.

Welcome to issue number three hundred and twenty-three of Hashtag Jakarta EE!

Right now, I am on my way home from Devnexus 2026. It was as busy as always, so I haven’t been able to finish up my post from the event, but I promise that it will be out there shortly. I will only have 24 hours at home this time before I am headed to JavaLand 2026. They have changed venue again and is going to be in Europa-Park in southern Germany. Hopefully this change of venue will be more successful than the last couple of editions at Nürburgring.

Another thing that hapened last week was that I became an IBM Champion. It makes sense since I am often using IBM technology such as Open Liberty in my demos at conferences around the World. Since I am new to the program, I don’t really know what it will mean, but I am excited to find outl.

The work on Jakarta EE 12 continues. In the weekly platform call, the progress is discussed and the projects for the individual component specifications report on what they are focusing at the moment. Due to inactivity in some of the projects, and recent layoffs among our member companies, the team is discussing how to bring on new committers and get them up to speed as fast as possible.

If you are still waiting for the follow-up post from my Will AI Kill Open Source post a couple of weeks ago, don’t despair. I have so much material for the next post and just need a little breathing room to organise my thoughts. In the context of this theme, I have done some pretty cool experiments that I am very eager to share once they are in a sharable state. Stay tuned…